TORRES JUAN EMILIO
Congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING AS PARADIGM OF THE THEORY OF ORGANIZATION: INTERNATIONAL PROCESS OF A UNIVERSITY ORGANIZATION
Lugar:
Viña del Mar
Reunión:
Conferencia; 6th- LATIN AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN MEETING ON ORGANIZATION STUDIES; 2016
Institución organizadora:
European Group of Organizational Studies (EGOS)
Resumen:
The work focuses on the process of social construction that constitutes the organizational life. It is based on a social constructivist paradigm, which draws attention to the process (micro-level) while its dynamics builds, stabilizes and re-builds the organizational social world (macro level).It addresses the ontological claim about organizational studies that, instead of focusing on organizations and their attributes seen as enduring wholes, they should be directed to the micropractices of facing everyday activities and to the ongoing sensemaking.This paper was developed within the context of a group that runs the Institutional Enhancement program in an Argentine University. This framework implemented a program aimed at increasing the inclusion of an Argentinean university in the process of internationalization of higher education. The Peirce method of abduction was used in the analysis, which makes inferencesfrom the visible into the hidden, providing interpretive explanations of what happened.We intend to explore the sensemaking process expressed in and circumscribed by the emerging discourse of participants? social interactions and established discourse in an organization as well as to understand the nature of the process of constructing meaning through the different factors involved in this construction.We focused on the processes and on the organizing (interaction, communication and events) as means to understand how organizations are carried out and not the way in which they appear, and on the interpretation of the process from the attribution of intentions and perceived causality determine the frames that complement the arguments that weave events into a meaningful whole.Formal documents prepared for the Institutional Strengthening Project were analyzed. As material for analysis, one database was used which consists of documents prepared by participants of the project and by non-members of the project team. This database allowed to study qualitatively the processes of organizing and sensemaking and to determine the characteristics of communicationamong members.We show that some institutionalized conditions related to the institutional order can facilitate the activation of events or limit their emergence, for example the relative autonomy of academic actors facilitates their individual action, in some cases giving rise to innovative actions and sometimes threatening plausibility of collective action (by making an emphasis beyond normal configuration of its shares in its own particular order), while other groups composed of actors from administrative areas restrict or limit the innovative actions through repetition of established routines.